Life Quotes, page 129

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”

“The meagre lighthouse, all in white and haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice that once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.”

“Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people we most despise.”

“Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.”

“Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.”

“The forces that affect our lives, the influences that mold and shape us, are often like whispers in a different room, teasingly indistinct, apprehended only with difficulty.”

“With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.”

“The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.”

“The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.”

“Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china.”

“I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.”

“And O, there are days in this life worth life and worth death.”

“When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.”

“Circumstances beyond my individual control.”

“I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt; and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there — no sympathy, sentiment, nonsense.”

“Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.”

“Yes. He is quite a good fellow — nobody's enemy but his own.”

“Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.”

“The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.”

“Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses — a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness.”

“It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.”

“Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It's so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.”

“A man has no right to be a public man unless he meets the public's expectations.”

“The wine-shops breed, in a physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution.”

“She indulged in melancholy, that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries.”

“Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that providence must sleep.”

“Besides, the children of the poor know but few pleasures. Even the cheap delights of childhood must be bought and paid for.”

“If great criminals told the truth (which, being great criminals, they do not) they would very rarely tell of their struggles against the crime. Their struggles are towards it. They buffet with opposing waves to gain the bloody shore, not to recede from it.”

“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”

“In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.”